Chords for TV3 Mike Scott Interview
Tempo:
93.775 bpm
Chords used:
D#
F#
Tuning:Standard Tuning (EADGBE)Capo:+0fret
Start Jamming...
[D#]
Now our next guest has been involved in music since he was a very young boy and he's grown
up in the punk era of the 70s and created fantastic rock and roll and folk music.
For the Waterboys in 83, he's currently a chance for music life on the road and WB8,
Mike Scott joins us.
Good morning sir.
Pleasure to meet you.
I was just saying there before the break, we met a long time ago in Galway in those
Halcyon This is the Sea days, [N] larks in the parks and beats in the streets.
I'm just saying that those songs, This is the Sea and The Hole of the Moon were kind
of anthems for that generation.
They were pop songs but they were also kind of, I don't know, blueprints for life as well
for a lot of people.
Did you have any sense of that when you were living in the country at the time?
How popular they were?
I knew how popular they were, yeah, and the stuff we did after, Fishman's Blues, Bang
in the Ear and so on, yeah.
I used to walk up Grafton Street and I would hear a song and I'd think, God, who does that song?
It's someone I like and I'd realise it was one of my own songs.
It's a nice feeling.
At least you weren't going, oh God, what's that noise?
At least you like your own stuff, Mike.
I remember reading some of the English press at the time because you'd had the three Waterboys
albums, what was called, I suppose it would be called, your big music period.
It was the Waterboys, Pagan Place and This is the Sea and you were a darling of the English
music press at the time.
Then you came to Ireland and I remember one English journalist saying, Mike Scott went
to Ireland and got lost.
And you did seem to come here and lose yourself in the place.
Is that a fair summation?
Lose myself in the place?
My life changed when I came to Ireland.
It changed in lots of good ways.
And I discovered, I'd made this cinematic, widescreen kind of music for three records
and I'd taken it as far as it could go and I was frustrated that I couldn't reproduce
it on stage.
And I got interested in simpler, older music like country music, gospel music and I wanted
to bring those into the Waterboys sound and I found in Ireland I could do it.
The catalyst was our fiddler Steve Wickham and when I had Steve in the band, suddenly
with his fiddle and my guitar, we could play any kind of music and that liberated me.
I was just wondering in those days, what was the reason for the change?
I know you say he was the catalyst but there must have been a personal change as well.
There were lots of personal changes.
You know, when I lived in London I didn't have much social life.
I came to Ireland and I don't know how you Irish see it but coming in from the outside
it seems an incredibly hospitable place and there's an atmosphere of easy going, you know this.
Definitely compared to living in London, definitely.
And I loved that.
I plugged into it.
It doesn't come more hospitable than Galway either, does it?
No.
In fairness, if you've got to go and sit in the bars of the world and meet, make friends,
literally almost instantly Galway is the place to do it.
How many years did you spend making Fishman's Blues and Room to Roam?
Three years.
Did the record company lose their mind?
Do you know, it was a weird situation, Mark.
We'd had a bit of success with This is the Sea and as often happens when a band gets
the first bit of success, they suddenly have a lot of power and nobody could say anything to me.
I was working on that record for so long.
Record company, no one, no one said boo.
We just got left to get on with it.
Really?
And in a way that was, we could have done, it was one time in my life I could have done
with someone looking over my shoulder saying come on, speed up here.
But there was no one to do that and we just kept recording.
We recorded probably more music than any album in the history of rock and roll.
I heard from an engineer who worked on Sessions for you around that time that you had enough
music to make about ten years worth of albums.
Oh absolutely.
That you had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of music.
Well.
Has it ever, and.
Yeah, where's that music now?
Well we've done three albums worth.
There was the original album.
Yeah.
There was a record came out in 2001 called Too Close to Heaven which was the best of
the unreleased stuff, at least in my opinion.
And then in 2006 we reissued Fishman's Blues, a remaster, and we did a bonus CD with another
17 or 18 tracks.
So a lot of it's come out now, about 55, 60 tracks.
But that means there's still some music sitting on a shelf somewhere.
There's quite a bit, yeah.
Hundreds of hours of it.
Can we talk about your fascination with poetry?
You're an English Literature and Philosophy, you studied that in college.
And was that where the love of poetry started or yet?
I never really did study it.
I went to university in 1977, my only interest was punk rock.
I didn't do a stitch of work.
And I dropped out.
You didn't go to any lectures, you dropped out?
I went to three or four lectures, dreamed, never paid any attention.
So, sorry about that.
But your love of poetry does exist and is still very strong in you, especially when it comes to Yeats.
Yeah, I grew up in a house full of books.
And my mother had lots of Yeats books and I picked them up when I was 10 or 11 years old.
Didn't understand a word of them but something caught.
Yeah.
Well you used Golden Child on
Stolen Child, yeah.
Stolen Child, yeah.
On Fisherman's.
Yeah, that was the first time I put Yeats to music.
I've done it a lot of times, as you probably know.
Well, I was going to say that next March you're going to do Five Nights in the Abbey.
That's right.
That's a massive undertaking because you're talking about a body of work that's incredibly well known.
So there'll be lots of expectations.
Are you nervous about that?
It's been a dream of mine for about 20 years, Mark, to make a show based on Yeats's poems.
After we did the Stolen Child and Fisherman's Blues, people began to tell me,
oh, have you heard Clanad have done this song, Bono's done this one, Van Morrison.
I began to realise a lot of people have done Yeats's poems, turned them into songs.
And I thought there's a show or there's a whole album in this.
And I didn't realise I was going to write it all myself but I did.
And I'm presenting it, Five Nights at the Abbey, next March, as you say.
Very fitting that it's at the Abbey as well, obviously.
Well, I wanted to do it there.
Yeah.
I wanted to make as radical a statement as I could.
Yeats's own theatre.
Okay.
What's the radical statement you're trying to make then?
Well, putting Yeats in a new context, turning his poems into rock and roll songs.
And is it rock and roll?
So it's not folksy, it's very rock and roll-y.
A lot of it is paint stripping rock and roll, yeah.
Yeats, I bet he never saw this day coming.
Well, he was kind of a rock and roll character in his own way.
He was, he was.
He's definitely left of centre.
No, he was radical, absolutely.
Yeah, he was radical, you're absolutely right.
Now, you famously said that the Waterboys is effectively wherever Mike Scott is
and whoever he happens to be working with at the time.
Yeah.
There's no question that you seem to be very happy when you work with Steve Wickham
and you're back working with him again and have been on a fairly regular basis.
So, you're on the road at the moment.
Now, he's in the band, you're in the band.
Who else is with you at the moment?
We've got a drummer called Carlos Hercules.
It's his real name.
Great, great name.
He lives in Limerick, English.
Bass player Mark Smith and we've got a new keyboard player from Belfast called John McCulloch.
No Anthony Toothless, wait.
No.
I did ask him to come and play these shows with us but he's busy with his day job in the Saw Doctors.
[F#] Well, he might show up.
I mean, you will be playing in the West, won't you?
I think he's on tour.
He's elsewhere.
Now, you're doing a couple of dates this weekend actually.
Are you in Galway this weekend?
We're in Galway on Friday, Skibbereen at the Court by South West on Saturday
and we're doing Rathangan in County Kildare on Sunday.
All festivals.
Yeah, so this is basically the festival line-up then.
So they're part of a festival rather than full waterboy shows, are they?
Yeah, I guess so.
I have to say, I'm still trying to think of Yeats' poem set to paint-stripping rock and roll.
I'll have to go and see it.
Mad is the mist and snow.
That's the wildest one we've got.
Mad is the mist and snow.
No, seriously, it's like that.
It really works, yeah.
You're going to pack the place.
People will be fascinated by it.
Are you hoping to introduce a new generation to Yeats who might not be familiar with him at all?
I wouldn't presume to do that because as far as I know you still get Yeats in school in Ireland.
But if I can present Yeats in a way that makes people listen to him anew
and hear, because his words are timeless, they're so great.
If I can turn people on to them just in a new way, I'll be happy.
So that's next March?
That's next March.
I look forward to that, Mike.
Mike, it was a pleasure to meet you.
Thank you very [N] much.
Absolutely, pleasure.
Now our next guest has been involved in music since he was a very young boy and he's grown
up in the punk era of the 70s and created fantastic rock and roll and folk music.
For the Waterboys in 83, he's currently a chance for music life on the road and WB8,
Mike Scott joins us.
Good morning sir.
Pleasure to meet you.
I was just saying there before the break, we met a long time ago in Galway in those
Halcyon This is the Sea days, [N] larks in the parks and beats in the streets.
I'm just saying that those songs, This is the Sea and The Hole of the Moon were kind
of anthems for that generation.
They were pop songs but they were also kind of, I don't know, blueprints for life as well
for a lot of people.
Did you have any sense of that when you were living in the country at the time?
How popular they were?
I knew how popular they were, yeah, and the stuff we did after, Fishman's Blues, Bang
in the Ear and so on, yeah.
I used to walk up Grafton Street and I would hear a song and I'd think, God, who does that song?
It's someone I like and I'd realise it was one of my own songs.
It's a nice feeling.
At least you weren't going, oh God, what's that noise?
At least you like your own stuff, Mike.
I remember reading some of the English press at the time because you'd had the three Waterboys
albums, what was called, I suppose it would be called, your big music period.
It was the Waterboys, Pagan Place and This is the Sea and you were a darling of the English
music press at the time.
Then you came to Ireland and I remember one English journalist saying, Mike Scott went
to Ireland and got lost.
And you did seem to come here and lose yourself in the place.
Is that a fair summation?
Lose myself in the place?
My life changed when I came to Ireland.
It changed in lots of good ways.
And I discovered, I'd made this cinematic, widescreen kind of music for three records
and I'd taken it as far as it could go and I was frustrated that I couldn't reproduce
it on stage.
And I got interested in simpler, older music like country music, gospel music and I wanted
to bring those into the Waterboys sound and I found in Ireland I could do it.
The catalyst was our fiddler Steve Wickham and when I had Steve in the band, suddenly
with his fiddle and my guitar, we could play any kind of music and that liberated me.
I was just wondering in those days, what was the reason for the change?
I know you say he was the catalyst but there must have been a personal change as well.
There were lots of personal changes.
You know, when I lived in London I didn't have much social life.
I came to Ireland and I don't know how you Irish see it but coming in from the outside
it seems an incredibly hospitable place and there's an atmosphere of easy going, you know this.
Definitely compared to living in London, definitely.
And I loved that.
I plugged into it.
It doesn't come more hospitable than Galway either, does it?
No.
In fairness, if you've got to go and sit in the bars of the world and meet, make friends,
literally almost instantly Galway is the place to do it.
How many years did you spend making Fishman's Blues and Room to Roam?
Three years.
Did the record company lose their mind?
Do you know, it was a weird situation, Mark.
We'd had a bit of success with This is the Sea and as often happens when a band gets
the first bit of success, they suddenly have a lot of power and nobody could say anything to me.
I was working on that record for so long.
Record company, no one, no one said boo.
We just got left to get on with it.
Really?
And in a way that was, we could have done, it was one time in my life I could have done
with someone looking over my shoulder saying come on, speed up here.
But there was no one to do that and we just kept recording.
We recorded probably more music than any album in the history of rock and roll.
I heard from an engineer who worked on Sessions for you around that time that you had enough
music to make about ten years worth of albums.
Oh absolutely.
That you had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of music.
Well.
Has it ever, and.
Yeah, where's that music now?
Well we've done three albums worth.
There was the original album.
Yeah.
There was a record came out in 2001 called Too Close to Heaven which was the best of
the unreleased stuff, at least in my opinion.
And then in 2006 we reissued Fishman's Blues, a remaster, and we did a bonus CD with another
17 or 18 tracks.
So a lot of it's come out now, about 55, 60 tracks.
But that means there's still some music sitting on a shelf somewhere.
There's quite a bit, yeah.
Hundreds of hours of it.
Can we talk about your fascination with poetry?
You're an English Literature and Philosophy, you studied that in college.
And was that where the love of poetry started or yet?
I never really did study it.
I went to university in 1977, my only interest was punk rock.
I didn't do a stitch of work.
And I dropped out.
You didn't go to any lectures, you dropped out?
I went to three or four lectures, dreamed, never paid any attention.
So, sorry about that.
But your love of poetry does exist and is still very strong in you, especially when it comes to Yeats.
Yeah, I grew up in a house full of books.
And my mother had lots of Yeats books and I picked them up when I was 10 or 11 years old.
Didn't understand a word of them but something caught.
Yeah.
Well you used Golden Child on
Stolen Child, yeah.
Stolen Child, yeah.
On Fisherman's.
Yeah, that was the first time I put Yeats to music.
I've done it a lot of times, as you probably know.
Well, I was going to say that next March you're going to do Five Nights in the Abbey.
That's right.
That's a massive undertaking because you're talking about a body of work that's incredibly well known.
So there'll be lots of expectations.
Are you nervous about that?
It's been a dream of mine for about 20 years, Mark, to make a show based on Yeats's poems.
After we did the Stolen Child and Fisherman's Blues, people began to tell me,
oh, have you heard Clanad have done this song, Bono's done this one, Van Morrison.
I began to realise a lot of people have done Yeats's poems, turned them into songs.
And I thought there's a show or there's a whole album in this.
And I didn't realise I was going to write it all myself but I did.
And I'm presenting it, Five Nights at the Abbey, next March, as you say.
Very fitting that it's at the Abbey as well, obviously.
Well, I wanted to do it there.
Yeah.
I wanted to make as radical a statement as I could.
Yeats's own theatre.
Okay.
What's the radical statement you're trying to make then?
Well, putting Yeats in a new context, turning his poems into rock and roll songs.
And is it rock and roll?
So it's not folksy, it's very rock and roll-y.
A lot of it is paint stripping rock and roll, yeah.
Yeats, I bet he never saw this day coming.
Well, he was kind of a rock and roll character in his own way.
He was, he was.
He's definitely left of centre.
No, he was radical, absolutely.
Yeah, he was radical, you're absolutely right.
Now, you famously said that the Waterboys is effectively wherever Mike Scott is
and whoever he happens to be working with at the time.
Yeah.
There's no question that you seem to be very happy when you work with Steve Wickham
and you're back working with him again and have been on a fairly regular basis.
So, you're on the road at the moment.
Now, he's in the band, you're in the band.
Who else is with you at the moment?
We've got a drummer called Carlos Hercules.
It's his real name.
Great, great name.
He lives in Limerick, English.
Bass player Mark Smith and we've got a new keyboard player from Belfast called John McCulloch.
No Anthony Toothless, wait.
No.
I did ask him to come and play these shows with us but he's busy with his day job in the Saw Doctors.
[F#] Well, he might show up.
I mean, you will be playing in the West, won't you?
I think he's on tour.
He's elsewhere.
Now, you're doing a couple of dates this weekend actually.
Are you in Galway this weekend?
We're in Galway on Friday, Skibbereen at the Court by South West on Saturday
and we're doing Rathangan in County Kildare on Sunday.
All festivals.
Yeah, so this is basically the festival line-up then.
So they're part of a festival rather than full waterboy shows, are they?
Yeah, I guess so.
I have to say, I'm still trying to think of Yeats' poem set to paint-stripping rock and roll.
I'll have to go and see it.
Mad is the mist and snow.
That's the wildest one we've got.
Mad is the mist and snow.
No, seriously, it's like that.
It really works, yeah.
You're going to pack the place.
People will be fascinated by it.
Are you hoping to introduce a new generation to Yeats who might not be familiar with him at all?
I wouldn't presume to do that because as far as I know you still get Yeats in school in Ireland.
But if I can present Yeats in a way that makes people listen to him anew
and hear, because his words are timeless, they're so great.
If I can turn people on to them just in a new way, I'll be happy.
So that's next March?
That's next March.
I look forward to that, Mike.
Mike, it was a pleasure to meet you.
Thank you very [N] much.
Absolutely, pleasure.
Key:
D#
F#
D#
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_ [D#] _ _ _ _ _ _
Now our next guest has been involved in music since he was a very young boy and he's grown
up in the punk era of the 70s and created fantastic rock and roll and folk music.
For the Waterboys in 83, he's currently _ a chance for music life on the road and WB8,
Mike Scott joins us.
Good morning sir.
Pleasure to meet you.
I was just saying there before the break, we met a long time ago in Galway in those
Halcyon This is the Sea days, [N] larks in the parks and beats in the streets.
I'm just saying that those songs, This is the Sea and The Hole of the Moon were kind
of anthems for that generation.
They were _ _ pop songs but they were also kind of, I don't know, blueprints for life as well
for a lot of people.
Did you have any sense of that when you were living in the country at the time?
How popular they were?
I knew how popular they were, yeah, and the stuff we did after, Fishman's Blues, Bang
in the Ear and so on, yeah.
I used to walk up Grafton Street and I would hear a song and I'd think, God, who does that song?
It's someone I like and I'd realise it was one of my own songs.
It's a nice feeling.
At least you weren't going, oh God, what's that noise?
At least you like your own stuff, Mike.
I remember reading some of the English press at the time because you'd had the three Waterboys
albums, what was called, I suppose it would be called, your big music period.
It was the Waterboys, Pagan Place and This is the Sea and you were a darling of the English
music press at the time.
Then you came to Ireland and I remember one English journalist saying, Mike Scott went
to Ireland and got lost.
And you did seem to come here and lose yourself in the place.
Is that a fair summation?
Lose myself in the place?
_ My life changed when I came to Ireland.
It changed in lots of good ways.
And I discovered, I'd made this cinematic, widescreen kind of music for three records
and I'd taken it as far as it could go and I was frustrated that I couldn't reproduce
it on stage.
And I got interested in simpler, older music like country music, gospel music and I wanted
to bring those into the Waterboys sound and I found in Ireland I could do it.
The catalyst was our fiddler Steve Wickham and when I had Steve in the band, suddenly
with his fiddle and my guitar, we could play any kind of music and that liberated me. _
I was just wondering in those days, what was the reason for the change?
I know you say he was the catalyst but there must have been a personal change as well.
There were lots of personal changes.
You know, when I lived in London I didn't have much social life.
I came to Ireland and _ I don't know how you Irish see it but coming in from the outside
it seems an incredibly hospitable place and there's an atmosphere of easy going, you know this.
Definitely compared to living in London, definitely.
And I loved that.
I plugged into it.
It doesn't come more hospitable than Galway either, does it?
No.
In fairness, if you've got to go and sit in the bars of the world and meet, make friends,
literally almost instantly Galway is the place to do it.
_ _ _ How many years did you spend making _ Fishman's Blues and Room to Roam?
Three years.
Did the record company lose their mind?
Do you know, it was a weird situation, Mark.
We'd had a bit of success with This is the Sea and as often happens when a band gets
the first bit of success, they suddenly have a lot of power and nobody could say anything to me.
I was working on that record for so long.
Record company, no one, no one said boo.
We just got left to get on with it.
Really?
And in a way that was, we could have done, it was one time in my life I could have done
with someone looking over my shoulder saying come on, speed up here.
But there was no one to do that and we just kept recording.
We recorded probably more music than any album in the history of rock and roll.
I heard from an engineer who worked on Sessions for you around that time that you had enough
music to make about ten years worth of albums.
Oh absolutely.
That you had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of music.
Well.
Has it ever, and.
Yeah, where's that music now?
Well we've done three albums worth.
There was the original album.
Yeah.
There was a record came out in 2001 called Too Close to Heaven which was the best of
the unreleased stuff, at least in my opinion.
And then in 2006 we reissued Fishman's Blues, a remaster, and we did a bonus CD with another
17 or 18 tracks.
So a lot of it's come out now, about 55, 60 tracks.
But that means there's still some music sitting on a shelf somewhere.
There's quite a bit, yeah.
Hundreds of hours of it.
Can we talk about your fascination with poetry?
You're an English Literature and Philosophy, you studied that in college.
And was that where the love of poetry started or yet?
I never really did study it.
I went to university in 1977, my only interest was punk rock.
I didn't do a stitch of work.
And I dropped out.
You didn't go to any lectures, you dropped out?
I went to three or four lectures, dreamed, never paid any attention.
_ So, sorry about that.
But your love of poetry does exist and is still very strong in you, especially when it comes to Yeats.
Yeah, I grew up in a house full of books.
And my mother had lots of Yeats books and I picked them up when I was 10 or 11 years old.
Didn't understand a word of them but something caught.
Yeah.
Well you used Golden Child on_
Stolen Child, yeah.
Stolen Child, yeah.
On Fisherman's.
Yeah, that was the first time I put Yeats to music.
I've done it a lot of times, as you probably know.
Well, I was going to say that next March you're going to do Five Nights in the Abbey.
That's right.
That's a massive undertaking because you're talking about a body of work that's incredibly well known.
So there'll be lots of expectations.
Are you nervous about that?
_ It's been a dream of mine for about 20 years, Mark, to make a show based on Yeats's poems.
After we did the Stolen Child and Fisherman's Blues, _ _ people began to tell me,
oh, have you heard Clanad have done this song, Bono's done this one, Van Morrison.
I began to realise a lot of people have done Yeats's poems, turned them into songs.
And I thought there's a show or there's a whole album in this.
And I didn't realise I was going to write it all myself but I did.
And I'm presenting it, Five Nights at the Abbey, next March, as you say.
Very fitting that it's at the Abbey as well, obviously.
Well, I wanted to do it there.
Yeah.
I wanted to make as radical a statement as I could.
Yeats's own theatre.
Okay.
What's the radical statement you're trying to make then?
Well, putting Yeats in a new context, turning his poems into rock and roll songs.
And is it rock and roll?
So it's not folksy, it's very rock and roll-y.
A lot of it is paint stripping rock and roll, yeah.
_ Yeats, I bet he never saw this day coming.
Well, he was kind of a rock and roll character in his own way.
He was, he was.
He's definitely left of centre.
No, he was radical, absolutely.
Yeah, he was radical, you're absolutely right.
Now, you famously said that the Waterboys is effectively wherever Mike Scott is
and whoever he happens to be working with at the time.
Yeah.
There's no question that you seem to be very happy when you work with Steve Wickham
and you're back working with him again and have been on a fairly regular basis.
So, you're on the road at the moment.
Now, he's in the band, you're in the band.
Who else is with you at the moment?
We've got a drummer called Carlos Hercules.
It's his real name.
Great, great name.
He lives in Limerick, English.
Bass player Mark Smith and we've got a new keyboard player from Belfast called John McCulloch.
No Anthony Toothless, wait.
No.
I did ask him to come and play these shows with us but he's busy with his day job in the Saw Doctors.
[F#] _ Well, he might show up.
I mean, you will be playing in the West, won't you?
I think he's on tour.
He's elsewhere.
Now, you're doing a couple of dates this weekend actually.
Are you in Galway this weekend?
We're in Galway on Friday, Skibbereen at the Court by South West on Saturday
and we're doing Rathangan in County Kildare on Sunday.
All festivals.
Yeah, so this is basically the festival line-up then.
So _ they're part of a festival rather than full waterboy shows, are they?
Yeah, I guess so.
I have to say, I'm still trying to think of Yeats' poem set to paint-stripping rock and roll.
I'll have to go and see it.
Mad is the mist and snow.
That's the wildest one we've got.
Mad is the mist and snow.
No, seriously, it's like that.
It really works, yeah.
You're going to pack the place.
People will be fascinated by it.
Are you hoping to introduce a new generation to Yeats who might not be familiar with him at all?
I wouldn't presume to do that because as far as I know you still get Yeats in school in Ireland. _
But if I can present Yeats in a way that makes people listen to him anew
and hear, because his words are timeless, they're so great.
If I can turn people on to them just in a new way, I'll be happy.
So that's next March?
That's next March.
I look forward to that, Mike.
Mike, it was a pleasure to meet you.
Thank you very [N] much.
Absolutely, pleasure.
Now our next guest has been involved in music since he was a very young boy and he's grown
up in the punk era of the 70s and created fantastic rock and roll and folk music.
For the Waterboys in 83, he's currently _ a chance for music life on the road and WB8,
Mike Scott joins us.
Good morning sir.
Pleasure to meet you.
I was just saying there before the break, we met a long time ago in Galway in those
Halcyon This is the Sea days, [N] larks in the parks and beats in the streets.
I'm just saying that those songs, This is the Sea and The Hole of the Moon were kind
of anthems for that generation.
They were _ _ pop songs but they were also kind of, I don't know, blueprints for life as well
for a lot of people.
Did you have any sense of that when you were living in the country at the time?
How popular they were?
I knew how popular they were, yeah, and the stuff we did after, Fishman's Blues, Bang
in the Ear and so on, yeah.
I used to walk up Grafton Street and I would hear a song and I'd think, God, who does that song?
It's someone I like and I'd realise it was one of my own songs.
It's a nice feeling.
At least you weren't going, oh God, what's that noise?
At least you like your own stuff, Mike.
I remember reading some of the English press at the time because you'd had the three Waterboys
albums, what was called, I suppose it would be called, your big music period.
It was the Waterboys, Pagan Place and This is the Sea and you were a darling of the English
music press at the time.
Then you came to Ireland and I remember one English journalist saying, Mike Scott went
to Ireland and got lost.
And you did seem to come here and lose yourself in the place.
Is that a fair summation?
Lose myself in the place?
_ My life changed when I came to Ireland.
It changed in lots of good ways.
And I discovered, I'd made this cinematic, widescreen kind of music for three records
and I'd taken it as far as it could go and I was frustrated that I couldn't reproduce
it on stage.
And I got interested in simpler, older music like country music, gospel music and I wanted
to bring those into the Waterboys sound and I found in Ireland I could do it.
The catalyst was our fiddler Steve Wickham and when I had Steve in the band, suddenly
with his fiddle and my guitar, we could play any kind of music and that liberated me. _
I was just wondering in those days, what was the reason for the change?
I know you say he was the catalyst but there must have been a personal change as well.
There were lots of personal changes.
You know, when I lived in London I didn't have much social life.
I came to Ireland and _ I don't know how you Irish see it but coming in from the outside
it seems an incredibly hospitable place and there's an atmosphere of easy going, you know this.
Definitely compared to living in London, definitely.
And I loved that.
I plugged into it.
It doesn't come more hospitable than Galway either, does it?
No.
In fairness, if you've got to go and sit in the bars of the world and meet, make friends,
literally almost instantly Galway is the place to do it.
_ _ _ How many years did you spend making _ Fishman's Blues and Room to Roam?
Three years.
Did the record company lose their mind?
Do you know, it was a weird situation, Mark.
We'd had a bit of success with This is the Sea and as often happens when a band gets
the first bit of success, they suddenly have a lot of power and nobody could say anything to me.
I was working on that record for so long.
Record company, no one, no one said boo.
We just got left to get on with it.
Really?
And in a way that was, we could have done, it was one time in my life I could have done
with someone looking over my shoulder saying come on, speed up here.
But there was no one to do that and we just kept recording.
We recorded probably more music than any album in the history of rock and roll.
I heard from an engineer who worked on Sessions for you around that time that you had enough
music to make about ten years worth of albums.
Oh absolutely.
That you had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of music.
Well.
Has it ever, and.
Yeah, where's that music now?
Well we've done three albums worth.
There was the original album.
Yeah.
There was a record came out in 2001 called Too Close to Heaven which was the best of
the unreleased stuff, at least in my opinion.
And then in 2006 we reissued Fishman's Blues, a remaster, and we did a bonus CD with another
17 or 18 tracks.
So a lot of it's come out now, about 55, 60 tracks.
But that means there's still some music sitting on a shelf somewhere.
There's quite a bit, yeah.
Hundreds of hours of it.
Can we talk about your fascination with poetry?
You're an English Literature and Philosophy, you studied that in college.
And was that where the love of poetry started or yet?
I never really did study it.
I went to university in 1977, my only interest was punk rock.
I didn't do a stitch of work.
And I dropped out.
You didn't go to any lectures, you dropped out?
I went to three or four lectures, dreamed, never paid any attention.
_ So, sorry about that.
But your love of poetry does exist and is still very strong in you, especially when it comes to Yeats.
Yeah, I grew up in a house full of books.
And my mother had lots of Yeats books and I picked them up when I was 10 or 11 years old.
Didn't understand a word of them but something caught.
Yeah.
Well you used Golden Child on_
Stolen Child, yeah.
Stolen Child, yeah.
On Fisherman's.
Yeah, that was the first time I put Yeats to music.
I've done it a lot of times, as you probably know.
Well, I was going to say that next March you're going to do Five Nights in the Abbey.
That's right.
That's a massive undertaking because you're talking about a body of work that's incredibly well known.
So there'll be lots of expectations.
Are you nervous about that?
_ It's been a dream of mine for about 20 years, Mark, to make a show based on Yeats's poems.
After we did the Stolen Child and Fisherman's Blues, _ _ people began to tell me,
oh, have you heard Clanad have done this song, Bono's done this one, Van Morrison.
I began to realise a lot of people have done Yeats's poems, turned them into songs.
And I thought there's a show or there's a whole album in this.
And I didn't realise I was going to write it all myself but I did.
And I'm presenting it, Five Nights at the Abbey, next March, as you say.
Very fitting that it's at the Abbey as well, obviously.
Well, I wanted to do it there.
Yeah.
I wanted to make as radical a statement as I could.
Yeats's own theatre.
Okay.
What's the radical statement you're trying to make then?
Well, putting Yeats in a new context, turning his poems into rock and roll songs.
And is it rock and roll?
So it's not folksy, it's very rock and roll-y.
A lot of it is paint stripping rock and roll, yeah.
_ Yeats, I bet he never saw this day coming.
Well, he was kind of a rock and roll character in his own way.
He was, he was.
He's definitely left of centre.
No, he was radical, absolutely.
Yeah, he was radical, you're absolutely right.
Now, you famously said that the Waterboys is effectively wherever Mike Scott is
and whoever he happens to be working with at the time.
Yeah.
There's no question that you seem to be very happy when you work with Steve Wickham
and you're back working with him again and have been on a fairly regular basis.
So, you're on the road at the moment.
Now, he's in the band, you're in the band.
Who else is with you at the moment?
We've got a drummer called Carlos Hercules.
It's his real name.
Great, great name.
He lives in Limerick, English.
Bass player Mark Smith and we've got a new keyboard player from Belfast called John McCulloch.
No Anthony Toothless, wait.
No.
I did ask him to come and play these shows with us but he's busy with his day job in the Saw Doctors.
[F#] _ Well, he might show up.
I mean, you will be playing in the West, won't you?
I think he's on tour.
He's elsewhere.
Now, you're doing a couple of dates this weekend actually.
Are you in Galway this weekend?
We're in Galway on Friday, Skibbereen at the Court by South West on Saturday
and we're doing Rathangan in County Kildare on Sunday.
All festivals.
Yeah, so this is basically the festival line-up then.
So _ they're part of a festival rather than full waterboy shows, are they?
Yeah, I guess so.
I have to say, I'm still trying to think of Yeats' poem set to paint-stripping rock and roll.
I'll have to go and see it.
Mad is the mist and snow.
That's the wildest one we've got.
Mad is the mist and snow.
No, seriously, it's like that.
It really works, yeah.
You're going to pack the place.
People will be fascinated by it.
Are you hoping to introduce a new generation to Yeats who might not be familiar with him at all?
I wouldn't presume to do that because as far as I know you still get Yeats in school in Ireland. _
But if I can present Yeats in a way that makes people listen to him anew
and hear, because his words are timeless, they're so great.
If I can turn people on to them just in a new way, I'll be happy.
So that's next March?
That's next March.
I look forward to that, Mike.
Mike, it was a pleasure to meet you.
Thank you very [N] much.
Absolutely, pleasure.